At 8 a.m. on a recent Saturday, nearly two dozen men, their faces set in expressions of nervous determination, strode onto the floor of the Star arena in Frisco, Texas. The group included software engineers, salesmen, retired police officers and dads in their 40s. As they took their places under the blazing floodlights, the crowd went wild.
“Which of these gladiators will emerge victorious?” roared Noah Dean, an upbeat M.C. in a cowboy hat.
The men gripped barbells. At the blast of an air horn, they heaved hundreds of pounds above their heads.
Welcome to Xenom. Part exercise class, part competition, it is a fitness company that gives its customers a chance to pit themselves against one another in weight lifting, running, gymnastics and other high-intensity workouts. Many of the workouts are drawn from CrossFit, the fitness company founded in California in 2000 that is an official partner of Xenom.
A Xenom weekend includes 10 events devised to test the participants’ strength (barbell lifts), speed (a three-kilometer run) and agility (handstand push-ups and pull-ups), not to mention the endurance needed to make it through the long days in one piece. The non-committed need not apply.
But the real purpose of Xenom is to make ordinary workout fiends feel like pros. It’s a kind of fantasy camp that the company founder, Keith Barlow, likened to Disney World. Just as Disney theme parks transport visitors to an ideal of childhood, Xenom offers its customers a chance to imagine themselves as Olympians or gladiators, if only for a couple of days.
“It’s about making you feel like a superstar, like the athlete you know you are inside,” Barlow said. “The only thing that matters here is whether I send these 500 people away from the event feeling like the hero of their own story.”
Barlow said that Xenom had spent more than $1 million to mount the weekend event, its first, at the Star arena. He added that the scale would only expand as Xenom moved on to the other cities, starting with London and Miami later this year.
On the competition floor, the money was visible in production values that suggested a televised sporting event. Hundreds of staff members, judges and volunteers in matching uniforms marshaled the competitors in and out of position. Large digital displays showed countdowns and running split times.
The participants could avail themselves of sports massages in a booth opposite the warm-up area. Every piece of equipment, from the gymnastics rig to the plates, bars and dumbbells around the arena, looked new. Nearly every surface had Xenom branding.
“For an inaugural event, it was all run very smoothly,” Theo DeHoyos, a member of the armed forces in his 50s who competed this weekend, said on Sunday night. “Not a lot of hiccups or problems. It seemed thought-out.”
The company can afford to go big — for the time being — because of the $15 million in capital that Barlow has raised, most of it from WndrCo, the technology investment firm operated by the former Disney chair Jeffrey Katzenberg.
Barlow’s pitch to Katzenberg was based on a study he had commissioned. It found that an estimated two million people work out in CrossFit’s worldwide network of almost 10,000 gyms, and another two million regularly put themselves through CrossFit-inspired workouts.
This combined group of four million men and women “are desperate for a competition” where they can put their training to the test, Barlow told Katzenberg.
CrossFit has its own competition — the CrossFit Games, which first took place nearly 20 years ago. But those are for the top 150 or so athletes from around the world, and the winners take home hundreds of thousands of dollars in prize money. Even smaller-scale CrossFit events attract professional-level participants.
It was Barlow’s contention that everyday workout enthusiasts would welcome the chance to feel like the best of the best. At the first Xenom weekend, an Elite division included Emily Rolfe and Colten Mertens, two CrossFit stars who competed alongside the amateurs.
“It was pretty incredible to be at an event where you’re next to competitive athletes,” Nate Denn, a senior master sergeant in the Air Force in his 40s, said.
Xenom is banking on the idea that CrossFit, which has had business troubles and leadership changes in recent years, may have missed an opportunity by limiting its games to elite athletes. Barlow envisions 2,000 participants at each Xenom weekend and hopes that there will eventually be dozens each year.
In this, he has some experience. As the co-founder of the publicity firm Fittest PR, Barlow has worked with the fitness race Hyrox since its inception, helping to scale its event from 500 racers in small-town Germany to the more than 1.6 million people who will participate in Hyrox races in cities around the world this year. But while Hyrox is intended as a simple, accessible challenge without any high-skill barbell or gymnastics movements, Xenom requires much more dedicated training and expertise, potentially limiting its mass appeal.
Xenom is not intended as a competitor to Hyrox, Barlow said, adding that it is in “a completely different category.”
“We are a premium, luxury product,” he said. “We’re not an event that needs millions of people to do it at $100 a ticket. We need 100,000 people to do it at $500, $600, $700 per ticket.”
It’s a steep price, particularly for CrossFitters, whose demographics skew toward law enforcement and members of the military. Barlow thinks they will pay because they are “absolutely obsessive.” He likened his audience to those who pay upward of $1,000 to take part in Ironman races.
“These people train five times per week,” he said. “Do physio work. Care about nutrition. Treat themselves like a professional athlete. That’s our consumer.”
More than half of those who took part in the recent competition didn’t pay the $500 entry fee, since Xenom gave away several hundred tickets in sweepstakes and raffles in order to generate word of mouth.
“You need to put enough out on the market for free so that it builds awareness and people understand what it is,” Barlow said. “It’s like the software business.”
The hope is that the spectacle — the rush of doing grueling workouts on a world-class stage, with lights and music — will convince amateurs that $500 is a small price to pay to feel like pros.
During one of the weekend’s final events, a 20-year-old Texan named Landon Yates pulled ahead of his competitors in a burpee race. “It’s Landon! Landon is ahead, ladies and gentlemen!” the announcer exclaimed. The audience of several hundred people, made up mainly of the participants’ friends and family members, whooped and cheered.
At his home gym in Abilene, Texas, Yates is just another regular who likes to stay fit. Out on the arena floor, he seemed like a star. The question is whether that’s enough to sustain Xenom’s ambitious business plan.
Barlow was optimistic. “If you go and ask anyone here whether they are considering doing another Xenom, I will be genuinely surprised if they say no,” he said.
At the end of the weekend, Denn, the Air Force senior master sergeant, was picking up an event memento, a bracelet with Xenom printed on the side. He said he had made the trip to Texas from his hometown in Alabama after scoring a ticket in a giveaway.
“I think I’d do it again,” Denn said. “But I’m not sure I’d pay 500 bucks.”
